November 15, 2012

Capitalism is a form of religion

Slavoj Žižek: Don't Act. Just
Think.

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Transcript

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Slavoj Zizek:

Capitalism
is . . . and this, almost I’m tempted to say is what is great about it,
although I’m very critical of it . . . Capitalism is more an
ethical/religious category for me. It’s not true when people attack
capitalists as egotists. “They don't care.” No! An ideal capitalist
is someone who is ready, again, to stake his life, to risk everything
just so that production grows, profit grows, capital circulates. His
personal or her happiness is totally subordinated to this. This is what
I think Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt School companion, thinker,
had in mind when he said capitalism is a form of religion. You cannot
explain, account for, a figure of a passionate capitalist, obsessed with
expanded circulation, with rise of his company, in terms of personal
happiness.

I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not
have any illusions here. No. What shocks me is that most of the
critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my
experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we
heard your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of
billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people's money. . . .
Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace the
system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general
moralistic answer, like “People shouldn't serve money. Money should
serve people.” Well, frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it,
especially because he would say, “When people serve money, money’s
controlled by Jews,” and so on, no? So either this or some kind of a
vague connection, social democracy, or a simple moralistic critique, and
so on and so on. So, you know, it’s easy to be just formally
anti-capitalist, but what does it really mean? It’s totally open.

This
is why, as I always repeat, with all my sympathy for Occupy Wall Street
movement, it’s result was . . . I call it a Bartleby lesson. Bartleby,
of course, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, you know, who always
answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” . . . The message of
Occupy Wall Street is, I would prefer not to play the existing
game. There is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the
existing forms of institutionalized democracy are not strong enough to
deal with problems. Beyond this, they don't have an answer and neither
do I. For me, Occupy Wall Street is just a signal. It’s like clearing
the table. Time to start thinking.

The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen
to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.” When this mantra
started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a
couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth
century. No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay,
but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives. So, let’s confront that
serious problem here.

Also, let’s not remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a
communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and
market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try
to get rid of the predominance of money market economy. The price they
paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct
domination, like you no longer will even formally flee. You had to obey
orders, a new authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious
problem: how to abolish market without regressing again into relations
of servitude and domination.

My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two
things: (a) precisely to start thinking. Don't get caught into this
pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Let’s do it, and so on. So,
no, the time is to think. I even provoked some of the leftist friends
when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers
have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis
11 . . . , that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we
maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to interpret
it again, to start thinking.”

Second thing, I’m not saying people are suffering, enduring
horrible things, that we should just sit and think, but we should be
very careful what we do. Here, let me give you a surprising example. I
think that, okay, it’s so fashionable today to be disappointed at
President Obama, of course, but sometimes I’m a little bit shocked by
this disappointment because what did the people expect, that he will
introduce socialism in United States or what? But for example, the
ongoing universal health care debate is an important one. This is a
great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes
the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of
choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on. I think this
freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure
ideology. But at the same time, universal health care is not some
crazy, radically leftist notion. It’s something that exists all around
and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western
European countries.

So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the
fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused
of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or
what. No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively
successfully and so on. So that would be my idea, to carefully select
issues like this where we do stir up public debate but we cannot be
accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.*